Stirring and Mixing of Reactive Scalars in the Context of Coral Spawning
John Crimaldi
Department of Civil Engineering
I will discuss a new class of reactive advection-diffusion problems motivated by
an ecological mixing process. Many marine invertebrates, including corals,
reproduce by a process called broadcast spawning. Males release sperm into the
surrounding flow, and females release eggs. The process then relies on
turbulent stirring and mixing to bring the gametes together. This problem
motivates the study of reactive stirring and mixing of two initially distinct
scalar point masses (i.e. egg and sperm) that are separated from one another by
a third (non-reactive) scalar (i.e the ambient water). I will outline a
combined numerical and experimental approach to investigating this problem. The
problem involves chaotic advection, and is an extension of some of the classical
problems in nonlinear dynamics.